Analyzing Social Media
Handout and exercises
Caterina Fugazzola (cfugazzola@uchicago.edu)
These are supplementary materials to my 2024 MAXDAYS spotlight presentation. If
you missed the spotlight, don’t worry! These handouts cover the features shown
live.

First off: What can we ask of QDA software?
• Many things, but not everything! The focus here should not be on web scraping
and importing data—though MAXQDA can help with that too to a certain extent.
• MAXQDA is optimized to help researchers manage, organize, analyze, andvisualize social media data
• There is no single recipe for social media analysis, and every platform will haveits own particularities• MAXQDA offers a set of tools that are powerful and flexible enough to keep up
with the speed and dynamism of social media• The software is optimized for multi-media analysis, allowing researchers to work
simultaneously on video, audio, images, and text data
• AI Assist features can help researchers as they are faced with large amounts oftextual data (e.g. social media comments)

Example 1 - YouTube
MAXQDA is optimized for importing YouTube data. To begin, click on the Import taband choose YouTube Data:

Then, paste the link to the video you want to analyze in the pop up window:

You can ask MAXQDA to autocode comments and to import transcripts, if available.

If you choose to autocode comments, MAXQDA will automatically generate codesindicating how many replies each comment generated. You will see two types ofsubcodes being created: one called “Comment at top level with [n] replies” and one
called “Reply to comment.”
When you import YouTube data, MAXQDA creates a new folder with an attachedmemo including video title, author, URL, posting date, description, and numerical
data such as number of views, likes, and dislikes.

Comments are saved in separate documents in the folder, arranged in multiple
tables containing up to 1000 rows per table. The tables include relevant comment
data such as author’s username and URL, posting date, and number of likes andreplies received.

Using AI Assist to make sense of large amounts of data
When faced with thousands of comments and replies, it can be hard to make senseof what is going on in the comments. AI Assist can help. One approach is to pickcomments that have generated a good number of replies (3 or 4, for example) andto ask AI Assist to suggest some subcodes. To do so, right-click on the code andselect AI Assist à Suggest Subcodes.

Once the suggestions have been generated, you can also further ask AI Assist to
provide a summary by clicking on the AI Assist button next to Code Summary:

AI Assist can also help make sense of the video transcript by providing a summary.
To generate a summary, right-click on the transcript document and select AI Assist
à Summarize Document.

Using some of the AI recommendations on subcodes and some of the summary, it ispossible to identify areas for further analysis. Then, MAXQDA offers many options
for further exploration. For example, you can use some of the subcodes
recommendations to identify key words to track in the comments. Try using some ofthe Analysis features to text search and autocode specific key words:

Here are some of the results for a keyword search:

Once you have autocoded your segments, it is also possible to further use AI Assist
to summarize the coded segments to get a full overview:

Try it out and play with these features as you analyze YouTube data!

Example 2 - Instagram